News – December 2018

Newly-published by Routledge last month was Islamic Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Islam, a new volume edited by Ian Parker and Sabah Siddiqui. It follows the 2017 international conference organised by the College of Psychoanalysts UK, Islamic Psychoanalysis/Psychoanalytic Islam, of which Parker is current President. This book unites authors from different psychoanalytic traditions who work at the interface of Islam and psychoanalysis. Chapters address issues such as cultural translatability in the context of Arab psychoanalytic cultural critique (Eva Tepest); representations of the psyche and its dynamics in Islam (Chiara Sebastiani); and the Hindu-Muslim politics of secular psychoanalysis in India (Zehra Mehdi).

Relatedly, Prof Parker’s latest book Psychoanalysis, Clinic and Context: Subjectivity, History and Autobiography was just announced for release in May. Drawing from his own experiences, from a trainee to an analyst, Parker explores the historical development of the culture and clinical practice of psychoanalysis, and how they have taken hold in different parts of the world. It contains chapters exploring diverse topics, including psychoanalysis in Japan, the political schisms within the analytic community, and trauma. It is available to pre-order now.

Martin Alomo has published a short work on Transference Love in Schizophrenia, looking at the clinical handling of the disorder and the paradoxes of defence it presents. Alomo teaches at the University of Buenos Aires and is a member of the Analytic Forum of Rio de la Planta and the International College of the Lacanian Field Forums. At present the title is only available in Kindle Edition from Amazon.

In New York, Lacanian Compass has announced it will be organising a three-part event in NYC on the theme ‘The Lacanian Unconscious, a No-Brainer’, which will run 15th-17th March with special guest Yves Vanderveken. More details here. It heralds the theme of the PIPOL9 Congress, which will take place 13th-14th July 2019 in Brussels under the title ‘The Unconscious and the Brain: Nothing in Common’. Relatedly, you can hear audio of Vanderveken’s presentation, ‘Structuring and destructuring of psychoanalysis’, which was given last August to Lacanian Compass Miami on Radio Lacan.

Also in New York, the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) will be hosting Alain Gibeault, Training Analyst of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society and Past Secretary General of the IPA, on 3rd February where he will present ‘On The Verge: Madness in the Psychoanalytic Encounter’. Gibeault will be discussing symbolisation and psychosis, and the French approach to its treatment. More details and how to book are here.

The New Lacanian School has announced that registration for its 2019 Congress is now open and available at a reduced rate until March. With the title ¡Urgent!, it will take place in Tel Aviv on the 1st and 2nd of June, 2019. A call for papers was issued last month with papers to be sent by 15th March. The Argument for the Congress is also now available, penned by Bernard Seynhaeve, and the theme is elaborated throughout the latest edition of The Lacanian Review.

The London Society of the New Lacanian School will be holding the second in its series of Study Days on ‘The Formation of the Analyst: Analysis, Supervision, Pass’ in London on Saturday 19th January. Its special guest will be Laurent Dupont, Vice-President of the École de la Cause Freudienne, whose recent piece on this topic, ‘The Urgency of the Analyst/Analysand’, appeared in the latest edition of The Lacanian Review. Advance tickets can be booked here.

The Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research has announced the programme for its Public Seminar series for the Spring 2019 term. Starting on 19th January with a round table on pleasure, pain, and self-harm, it runs up to 30th March, with talks and panel discussions on topics including drug and alcohol addiction, states of excitation in psychosis, and whether jouissance is such a great concept.

Finally, translations of the first five sessions of Lacan’s Seminar IV, Object Relations, are now available on LacanianWorks. The site also contains a provisional list of Lacan’s references during the Seminar, up to the seventh session. LacanianWorks is regularly updated with the latest progress on the translation project, so be sure to check back periodically for this and other resources.

LacanOnline.com is a site for exploring psychoanalysis through the work of Jacques Lacan

Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst, 1901 - 1981.
Trained as a psychiatrist, he abandoned the profession in favour of psychoanalysis in the early thirties. After publishing his paper on the Mirror Stage in 1949, for which he is probably best known to the general public, in the early fifties Lacan embarked on a project he called the 'Return to Freud'.

Lacan began holding yearly seminars, starting in 1952, re-examining Freud's work. At the time, the theory and technique of psychoanalysis was facing a complete overhaul at the hands of post-Freudian psychoanalysts, many of whom had emigrated to the United States after the war. Lacan railed against their teaching of Freud, seeing it as an oversimplification of his work and a corruption of psychoanalytic technique reducing it to the status of life management. Through his seminars he offered another interpretation of Freud's work and psychoanalytic theory. Inventive, radical and adventurous, many still believe Lacan's to be a creative mis-reading of Freud.

However Lacan's seminars grew in popularity and as his teaching developed from a reading of Freud's text to an elaboration of his own concepts his teaching became more influential. Lacan continued to give yearly seminars until the year before his death in 1981. By that time, he had become a major intellectual figure in public life and had both created and disbanded his own school, separating his members both from the established psychoanalytic institutions and from each other.

Today, Lacanian theory is advanced by a number of disparate groupings of his followers and the technique of psychoanalysis he developed is practiced clinically by Lacanian analysts around the world.